Stone Gods (16 page)

And the Idols?

Spikkers moaned and covered his face with his hands, and rocked on his heels like one abandoned to grief 'Mana gone,' he said. 'They kill the Mo'ai to kill the Mana.'

It does seem that the Easter Islanders practised a form of ancestor worship, and that it was they, indeed, and not another people who had laboured to quarry and raise the statues. Spikkers spoke of a 'back-time' when the labouring of the Stone Gods had been the sole purpose of the island's society, and when the carvers and workers were fed and clothed by the other islanders.

I fancied that this statue building was intended to obtain super natural rewards, not dissimilar to our own medieval cathedrals, and paid for in the same manner, for a man who is building a Church cannot sow oats and barley or tend his flock, but must rely on others to supply his dinner.

And I thought of the immense human effort that is put to enterprises of all kinds that yield no obvious return and yet are deemed more worthy than the grazing of oxen and the manufacture of cloth.

I do not deem this a fault. There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit, for the Bible says to us, 'What should it profit a Man that he gain the whole World and lose his own Soul?'

But none has seen his Soul, yet all have seen a small corner of the world, and would have more of it.

It was the day of our Departure from Plymouth Sound, that being the 13th of July 1772 and the weather clowdy.

The Ship was well furnished with mutton and good victuals of every kind, and brandywine and portwine.

It was our purpose to discover the Southern Continent, if such a place there be, and to make a Map, and to claim Land for the Crown. Yet there are at once two voyages to be made — the first of direction and course, and the second unpurposed and untried, and if that voyage can be mapped I do not know any man that has mapped it, for each must make the voyage his own, and record it in the secret places of his heart.

I do not know if Man has a Soul, but if he does, then it follows in the wake of his Ship, like an albatross or frigate-bird. I do not believe that he carries it within him like a shadowy shape of himself inside himself, and that is the reason his Soul is nowhere to be found at death, for it does not keep its residence in a man's body, but in his purpose. As I go forward my Soul comes after me to see what it is that I do, for there is a curiosity there, like that of a seabird, that ploughs the wake of a Ship and then flies away no man knows where.

The Ship, the Crew, the Voyage, and what am I but a Ship in little, and above me the white throat of a winged bird?

I was now satisfied in my mind that the Idols had been worked for magical purposes and in veneration of unseen powers. Rival wars had begun the deadly destruction of vying Idols — for if I can keep my ancestor, while losing you yours, I increase my Mana. The waste of such an enterprise seems hardly to have struck them, but I admit that my countrymen do the same in their warring and burning. Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself

Spikkers took my hand and walked with me back round the island towards the site of the felling of the tree. I was as much vexed by that as I had been by the Idols, and urged him to make an explanation.

It was a ghastly history.

In 'back-time', the god MakeMake had filled the island with forests and springs and fishes and birds so that no man could want who could stretch out his hand. Into this abundance came the Ancestors in boats, making houses and ceremonial dwellings and living only by the word of the White Man — the Ariki Mau.

Wood was needed for fires and building, and land was needed for plantains and bananas and sundry crops. The Palms that were so tight together that a man must walk sideways to pass through them were felled, one by one by one, until, slow by slow by slow, the seabirds no longer visited the island, and the rain no longer fell, and the ground crumbled and burned, and the soil turned to red dust that grew nothing.

Yet I was perplexed by this, for a man must need a mighty number of fires to clear a forest, and the Islanders did not seem so many that they could use up a whole world. Happen it was the rats that had eaten the nuts of the Palm and harmed its generation — we had seen infestations of rat-kind in Tahiti — yet the natives there had managed their land with broad sense.

Spikkers pointed to the Idols, and mimed to me that the great stones must be pulled from the quarry on wooden sledges, and that entire Palms must be used as raft-lengths to float the stone down the coast, and that the kiln-work and the carving-work required ever greater amounts of wood, and no man dreamed that the wood gone would never return.

'And this tree yesterday that I saw drop, was it the last tree of them all?'

Spikkers nodded his head. The Ariki Mau had ordered its protection as a sacred tree, and the Bird Man had ordered its felling. 'Is it to be believed,' I said, 'that an island abundant in all things necessary has been levelled to this wasteland through the making of a Stone God and then by his destruction?'

Spikkers nodded his head.

In the days that followed he made me to visit the South and West of the island, and truly all that he had spoken had its truth in the deadened land and the eerie sight of the stone Mo'ai — some remaining upright, their smooth backs to the sea, their unseeing eyes fixed on the inland, and countless more felled in savage attacks on their purpose.

To the East of the island we did not venture, for that part, said Spikkers, is home to the Bird Man and his followers, and a place of utmost danger to us.

I began to understand that Spikkers was preparing for some conquest of his own.

He had revealed to me that the Bird Man's reign lasted for only twelve moons, making it a little less than a Solar year, and that every year, at the appointed time, there was a competition, or some manner of sport, that decided the winner or leader of the Bird Man cult for the year to come.

I tried not to laugh at his serious description, and half thought that I had misfathomed his explanation, for the thing seemed to be an Egg Race — and the one who could gather the first Egg laid by the visiting Sooty Terns would claim for himself the privileges of the Bird Man.

'Tis not strange that the Bird be such a symbol for the Natives, for the Bird may travel where he will, across the sea to other lands, and the Natives make no distinction between the lands of the Dead and the lands of the Living. That they themselves cannot travel at all, having not even a piece of wood remaining with which to fashion a deep-sea canoe, lends the Bird an increase of power. The Bird that fliies, and the man that cannot, lies at the bottom of all their thoughts.

And Spikkers would have me know that birds were once abundant here, like fishes and trees and water, and their departure is the anger of the gods.

Spikkers is no friend of the Bird Man: he worships the old way of Ariki Mau, and has formed a plan to win back for the old gods the rights of the new power.

He shall climb the cliffs and find the Egg and give it to the Ariki Mau, so that once more the power of the island lies in one place. This, he said, will end the destruction and the civil war and bring peace and prosperity to the island. The trees will grow and the birds will return.

He does believe this, truly, and his shining face causes me to drop my eyes for fear of hurting his happiness.

He shows me the cliffs where the Terns will come, as high and impossible as a moon landing, and he shows me a chart, hidden in his cave, where he has scratched the calendar of their flights over many years — or moons, as he understands time. He is made ready, and for his reward, he says, he will ask only to leave the island with me when the next Ship sails this way. I do not say to him that I have no hope of such a Ship.

There are many things I do not say.

In the back of the cave is a piece of blue cloth. Wrapped in the piece of blue cloth is a Delft tile. The tile is a picture of a tall house with its door open. A man in a hat waits inside the hall.

It is six month since I found myself abandoned here, as foolish as a dog that leaps from the deck in some stray port.

Through these six month I have lived in Spikkers' cave, and he has fed me and made much of me and kept the rest at bay, for he has authority of some sort with the Ariki Mau in that he has learned writing, which imparts ceremonial power. This script, which they name Rongorongo, does not use our alphabet, yet rather forms characters and signs that stand in place of whole phrases or expressions. This powerful Mana is translated on to spears and holy objects, and is now employed for the Egg Race, for so I shall call it, as servants of the Ariki Mau begin to gather beneath the cliffs, waving flags to attract the Tern.

This is a magical observance, but not so strange to me for mine own country uses a flag as its symbol, which it waves to attract attention and to signify dominion. The Land we claim for our own we claim by flag, and why should not these Natives do the same, except that the territory they desire be a spiritual holding?

It is as if, here, everything signifies some other thing: the Bird, the Egg, the flag, the writing, the winning, the winner, the Stone Gods, even the island, even the world are symbols for what they are not.

I have a sixpence in my pocket and a pair of trousers that allows me to have a pocket. I was a seaman and I had a mother. Bundle it all together and what does it stand for? Is it that I am Nothing that I must always stand for Something? Six month have passed and I cling to my Self as an Englishman, as I clung to my trousers on the sands when they made fain to undress me.

I must have some covering, the world must have some covering for its nakedness, and so the simplest things come to impart the greatest significance — a piece of bread becomes a body, a sip of wine, my life's blood. That one thing should stand for another is no harm, until the thing itself loses any meaning of its own. The island trees and all of this good land were sacrificed to a meaning that has now become meaningless. To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed, and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed.

It is the day of the Race.

The Tern has been sighted.

The cliff face is sheer as Judgement Day. Myself, I could not climb it to save my Soul, but if I am right-minded that our Souls are Birds, they will have gone before us to that high place, and have no more use for bodies like mine.

The cliff-stone is like a puzzle — where now for fingers and feet?

I count twenty-three of the Natives running for the honour of the prize, and none thinks he will fail. The Bird Man clan has picked a proxy for the Race, a swaggering oaf who will win the Egg for his master, or so he believes.

And I think to myself that I could as well be on the dock-side at Chatham for all the vanity and preening that I see before me. This may be a wasteland but here, as in every place the world can shew, men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg — it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.

Spikkers, clad in my trousers to bring him luck — or, as he calls it, to add my Mana to his own — bends his head so that I can tie his head-band. He has sewn a pouch to the front of it, and in the manner of the Kangaroos will carry the Egg in that pouch. He tells me he has had a dream, and that his father came to him and gave him the Egg in one hand, and with the other hand took him to live in Amsterdam, in a house, he says, made all of wood, and him the richest man on the earth.

It is sure that here their word for wood —
'rakau'
— also means 'riches', and that if they were, this day, to find a mine of gold or a cave of rubies, they would account it as nothing against a wormy plank washed up by the sea.

The signal given, the competitors begin their run and climb — some with crude home-made pegs hung round their waists to cram into the rock for a foothold, and some with human bones strapped to their forearms as levers or grips.

Near all the people of the island have turned forth to watch the Race, and there is great shouting and cheering among the rivals, as at a cockfight.

Up they go, fast as rats.

And my heart is beating.

Truth tell, anywhere is a life, once there is a love.

I took to sea in that I could not stay at home, in that I could not stay at home for James Hogan had took to sea.

Now that I have Nothing and am Nothing, I have shrunk this pod of an island further and made our cave an everywhere. When everywhere is here there is no further to travel, and tho' I have flung out my message in a bottle, I care nothing if the world catches my signal or no, and tho' I scan the seas for a ship, I care nothing that it come or no, and have employed myself with yams and Wells and small fish, and wait for him who rescued me.

Where is he?

I waded into the sea and swam round the point. There was Spikkers, high, higher than any, and climbing towards the sun like a god. Above him the Tern swooped and flew, her agitation betraying her. I saw him pause, reach, find. I saw the jubilation in his body, the way a fox is jubilant when it takes a rabbit — its very blood and bone caught rejoicing, his back stiff with pleasure.